ITALIAN MODERN ART | ISSUE 2: The Enigma of ISSN 2640-8511 the Double: Sources and Symbols in Alberto Savinio’s Poetics THE ENIGMA OF THE DOUBLE: SOURCES AND SYMBOLS IN ALBERTO SAVINIO'S POETICS 0 italianmodernart.org/journal/articles/the-enigma-of-the-double-sources-and-symbols-in- alberto-savinios-poetics Nicol Maria Mocchi Alberto Savinio, Issue 2, July 2019 https://www.italianmodernart.org/journal/issues/alberto-savinio/ Abstract This paper analyzes one of the most ambiguous and enigmatic themes within the poetics of Alberto Savinio: that of the double, which continually resurfaces in the author’s work, taking on different meanings – from the concept of hermaphroditism to that of half-death, and from those of the mask to the shadow. Through a brief historical-theoretical excursus, the presentation will retrace chronologically the evolution of this fascinating topic in the vast musical, pictorial, literary and theatrical production of the minor of the “Dioscuri.” This essay discusses a favorite theme of Alberto Savinio: the double. Taking on different meanings and aspects, this theme continually resurfaces in his work, from the general concept of the metaphysical Weltanschauung’s dual reality, to the particular ideas of double personalities contained in the concepts of the shadow, half-death, the mask, and hermaphroditism – the leitmotifs of Savinio’s “creative power station,” as he defined it.1 The etymology of the word double originates in the Latin duplus, defined as one made up of two parts, not necessarily identical but different, and the theme of the double refers to the ontological dualism – the existence of two antithetical principles, often struggling with each other – that can be conceived in any field, whether philosophical, religious, political, or scientific. This understanding of a double vision of the world is ancient in origin and extends throughout the history of modern thought. It takes its meaning from the light/dark dualism of ancient Zoroastrian religion and of pre-Socratic philosophy, followed, centuries later, by René Descartes’s contraposition of res cogitans and res extensa, the metaphysical duplicity of phenomenon and noumenon in Immanuel Kant, variously taken up by Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, and declined in the binomial ego and superego in Sigmund Freud and structure and superstructure in Karl Marx. ITALIAN MODERN ART These are just some examples of how the double Weltanschauung had a rich July 2019 | Alberto Savinio 1/27 ITALIAN MODERN ART | ISSUE 2: The Enigma of ISSN 2640-8511 the Double: Sources and Symbols in Alberto Savinio’s Poetics tradition before breaking, like a wave, in the metaphysical poetics that the de Chirico brothers developed between 1909 and 1911, aimed at discovering and expressing the hidden spirit of things, the symbolic or double dimension of reality. In “‘Anadioménon.’ Principi di valutazione dell’arte contemporanea” (‘Anadyoménon.’ Assessment principles of contemporary art), which is the cornerstone of Savinio’s aesthetics, published in May 1919 in the Roman journal Valori plastici, he conceived of the metaphysical as “everything real that continues to be beyond the roughly self-evident aspects of reality itself.” The aim of art was to reproduce “the spectrality [that] is the true, spiritual, and substantial essence of every aspect,” namely the internal appearance of things, “cleansed of every overlapping of heterogeneous elements.”2 In Savinio’s early tale La casa ispirata (The inspired house, 1925; initially published in installments in 1920), the essential quality of the artist-poet is mentioned as the “double sight” or “double look,”3 concepts borrowed from the “second sight” of Schopenhauer to indicate a borderline state between dream and hallucination, clairvoyance and magic, where the true essence of reality can be grasped. Around the same time, Giorgio de Chirico, alluding to the revelations from which the first metaphysical masterpieces were born, stated that everything has two aspects: “a current one, that we see almost always and what people generally see, and another spectral or metaphysical one, which only rare individuals can see in moments of clairvoyance and metaphysical abstraction.”4 The theme of the double, in the metaphysics of the two brothers, is not simply present as a metamorphic dualism of reality; rather, it penetrates the inner dimension of modern man as a doubling of the ego. This “psychological” double – in flesh-and-blood form (think about the Roman playwright Plautus’s comedy of misunderstandings) and also as shadow, soul, reflection, or portrait detached from the self – came back as a trend in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, most especially in the fantastical narratives of Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, Adelbert von Chamisso, and Alfred de Musset, as well as Fyodor M. Dostoevsky, Guy de Maupassant, Franz Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Oscar Wilde. All of these authors recount the phenomenon of the Doppelgänger, literally “a double walker” or “double goer,” who personifies the dark and unknown side that dwells within the self. The de Chirico brothers, too, obviously underwent its charm, as the majority of their metaphysical works document, but they confer a much broader and complex range of interpretations than just Symbolism and Decadentism – by ITALIAN MODERN ART July 2019 | Alberto Savinio 2/27 ITALIAN MODERN ART | ISSUE 2: The Enigma of ISSN 2640-8511 the Double: Sources and Symbols in Alberto Savinio’s Poetics giving a value not necessarily negative, but rather full of constructive and emancipating possibilities. The double, for both, was not an invisible, oppressive enemy to be resolutely fought against. It was not even a desperate escape from bourgeois boredom, or a manifestation of schizophrenic dissociation tout court. Quite the opposite: it assumed, with the usual metaphysical lightness and irony, the connotations of an enigmatic, outrageous, and magical force, on the one hand a form of liberation, and on the other a deep level of knowledge. The de Chirico brothers considered the soul, in a strictly secular sense, the double of the man, his Kâ. Giorgio, in a 1919 article in Ars Nova, wrote of “the possibility of the existence of immaterial forms, of imagining one of our doubles, one of our Khâ, to speak as an Indian, made up of fluids and incorporeal substances.”5 Savinio remembered that in Lucian’s dialogues the shadows, from the afterlife, accuse the man of mistakes made during his lifetime: “the shadow as a double (Kâ), the shadow as a soul that can also be sold to the devil (Peter Schlemihl), the shadow that must not be placed next to the body that one wants to preserve in a condition of immortality (Giotto’s figures who have no shadow).”6 This shadow inspired fear, being the “darkness” of ourselves. Often, the theme of the double was reexperienced by Giorgio and Alberto in an autobiographical and mythical key, that is, as the duality of two brothers who identified with the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, who departed with the Argonauts from the small port of Volos in Thessaly (where Giorgio was born, in fact) in search of the Golden Fleece (figure 1). They identified also with the mythical figure of the hermaphrodite, repeatedly represented and evoked in their respective works. Savinio gave the title Hermaphrodito to his first book, published in 1918.7 For him, the hermaphrodite coincided with an innocent, childlike state, an emblem of a newfound harmony between opposites, prior to the decision by Jupiter – envious of the double men – to “cut them in the middle like pears,” resulting in “two of each.”8 This seems almost a metaphor of the “twin spirit” shared by the two brothers in their earliest years. Savinio remembered this period as when “nothing divided us yet and we 9 had only one thought in two,” before their paths separated. Especially in their Italian period, the brothers painted quite probably similar subjects – for example, Giorgio’s L’enigma dell’oracolo (The enigma of the oracle, 1909), and Alberto’s Oracolo (Oracle, c. 1909; figures 2–3), the only juvenile drawing so far known of him – and they collaborated on a first music concert by Savinio, planned for the Teatro della Pergola in Florence, but held instead in Munich in January 1911. ITALIAN MODERN ART July 2019 | Alberto Savinio 3/27 ITALIAN MODERN ART | ISSUE 2: The Enigma of ISSN 2640-8511 the Double: Sources and Symbols in Alberto Savinio’s Poetics Some parts of the section “Le Rivelazioni. La musica più profonda sinora scritta” (The revelations: The most profound music ever written) were composed by Giorgio, others by Alberto (figure 4). Despite the almost symbiotic complicity of sensations and deductions that characterize the de Chiricos’ early works, there are considerable poetic diversities precisely in relation to the theme of the Figure 1. Giorgio de Chirico, “Autoritratto con il fratello” [Self- portrait with his brother], 1923–24. Tempera on canvas, 34 1/4 x double, considering the 26 3/4 in. (87 x 68 cm). Private Collection. different means of expression adopted by the two brothers. For Giorgio, who was mainly a painter and a poet with a more romantic view, the double expressed mostly an intimate, narcissistic self- contemplation, always lived in an ironic key, or it revealed his animistic opposite, as shown by the many double self-portraits of the twenties, for example Autoritratto con ombra (Self-portrait with shadow, 1920; figure 5), in which the outline of the white shadow is undeniably that of the painter; whereas for the encyclopedic Alberto – a musician, writer, essayist, critic, painter, set designer, and illustrator incessantly in search of the most congenial expressive form to suit his purposes – the double could take several aspects not immediately graspable. At times it was a ghost or life force capable of passing from one state to another while preserving the memories and feelings of earthly life; at others it was a conscience, at once angelic and diabolical, expressive of the darkest, scariest sides within us.